Believing fashion to be intrinsically political, from December 2007 through summer 2008 Nick Knight staged a multi-level film and essay project, encouraging creatives to use the medium of fashion to convey their political beliefs, agendas and thoughts. Contributors include Beth Ditto, Gareth Pugh, Naomi Campbell, Steven Klein, Vanessa Friedman and Vivienne Westwood.

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Essay - Alison Clarke

Fashioning Dissent

by an unknown user on 26 March 2008.

Among primitive peoples, it is reported, women’s private property generally develops later than that of men, and, originally, and often exclusively, refers to adornment. By contrast, the personal property of the male usually begins with weapons. Georg Simmel, ‘Adornment’ (1904)

From sexual assertiveness of the ‘red hot’ lipstick that came to define the New Woman of the 1920s, to the pro-African American hair and beauty treatments of early 20th century black entrepreneur Madame C J Walker, fashion has wielded a politics at the forefront of women’s everyday lives. Fashion is not just an industry peddling rarefied clothes. At its most basic it is a process incorporated into daily practices and rituals, traditions, knowledges and bodily habits. We are all familiar with the self-aggrandizing claims of individual fashion geniuses, from avant-garde designers to fashion investors, over their contribution to aesthetic economy and ‘culture’ per se. But fashion is actually lived and politicized in more intimate and mundane terms. In Carolyn Steadman’s now classic feminist history/ auto-biography, Landscape of a Goodwoman (1987), she describes how the post-WW II working-class culture of longing, embodied in her own mother’s desire for the fashionable glamour of a Christian Dior New Look dress, was far from trivial; rather it was at the core of an emerging class and gender politics that would transform society.

The furore over celebrity emulation, $5,000 hand-bags, size zero models and ‘It’ shoes provides us with an endless circus of controversy over fashion’s escalating degeneracy and absurdity; and women’s complicity in its futile antics. But this tends to obscure the fact that fashion, and its anti-fashion movements and counter dispositions, is more accessible today than at any other period in history; likewise the definitions of its practice. Within fashion, connoisseurship and elitism are as rife as in the upper echelons of any art market. However, the devolution of style knowledge through the accelerated and heterogeneous forum of the internet has already generated the possibility of a whole new relation between politics, fashion and everyday lives; one that might even render its original power-brokers, from hard-copy editors to celebrity stylists, ultimately redundant.

About

Believing fashion to be intrinsically political, from December 2007 through summer 2008 Nick Knight staged a multi-level film and essay project, encouraging creatives to use the medium of fashion to convey their political beliefs, agendas and thoughts.

From the beginning of December 2007, the first stage of 'Political Fashion Films' invited visitors to SHOWstudio.com to submit a film of between 30 seconds and 3 minutes that articulated some kind of political point using fashion.

Inkeeping with previous film seasons 'Moving Fashion' and 'Editing Fashion', in February 2008, this invitation was opened up to a wide selection of fashion industry, art world and celebrity figures, whose Political Fashion Films created to the same brief were broadcast on SHOWstudio.com one film per weekday, alongside essays exploring the themes and issues raised by this provocative subject matter.